View all notes
On our first date, we walked through Chinatown, stopping for lotus paste buns. “Diaphanous,” he said, and had me take a bite of his. It was the closest our two bodies had been, in an afternoon of walking side by side, each careful not to touch the other. The lotus paste had more fragrance than flavor. Later, I was never able to re-create that taste, after visits to bakeries all over Chinatown.
None of it could be re-created. We’d eaten the lotus paste buns on a cold, damp November day, on which the sun shone and rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruits and vegetables in vendors’ bins, green bok choys, smooth, sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, the huge, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.
Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn’t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.
It was a cold winter day. When I arrived, he had company. A friend just about to leave, who was sitting on a couch in Sandro’s loft, flipping through an art catalogue. He wore a peacoat and scarf, and his hair was darker, from winter light, or because it needed to be washed, but he looked otherwise just the same. Just the same.
Rain began to fall, wet darts hitting the windows of the loft. The rain fell harder and harder until the sound rose to an incredible crescendo, like glass beads pouring down over the front of Sandro’s building. The sky beyond the windows was dense and gray but with the curious buttery quality of daytime darkness, as if there were a yellowish light lurking behind the rain clouds. Time had slowed to an operatic present, a pure present.
“My very best friend,” Sandro said as he introduced us.
This friend of his stood.
In that strange light, the showering-glass-beads rain, I felt that I was seeing this person before me in two ways at once. Again — finally. And also for the very first time. His smile was simple and open. If there was the faintest edge of knowingness in it, it was purely of this type: my friend digs you. That was all.
I don’t want to know your name, I’d said to him that night, when he was one of the people with the gun, Nadine and Thurman’s friend.
But now I did know his name: Ronnie Fontaine.
“We have a problem,” the manager said.
“What is the problem?” Didi called back.
“A strike,” the manager said. “In Milan.”
The manager called everyone under the awning, around the workbenches. Didi hunched over the steering wheel in the Spirit of Italy, scowling, as if impatience alone could get his vehicle powered up and motoring along the flats, while his team decided that as loyal members of the union, which was in contract negotiations and had voted to strike, they were obligated to strike as well.
The mechanics in Milan were conducting something called a work-to-rule strike, so the mechanics on the salt flats conducted their own work-to-rule strike. It was a way of striking without striking, as Tonino explained it to me. They were still getting paid, and not at risk of being fired and replaced. They simply went absolutely by union and company code on every single procedural element of their jobs, and their unions and procedures being Italian and deeply bureaucratic, each task, if accomplished according to code, took much longer than it normally would.
Didi, not in the union, not a company employee, but a celebrity racer with an independent contract, was furious.
those were the days
Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air. I thought of smashed horse chestnuts on the sidewalks of Reno. The feel of new corduroy. Of course I had a great story to report, and the hopefulness I sensed from the gold-edged leaves above me could have been my own.
I had run an errand for Marvin, dropping off processed film to an address on lower Fifth, and was on my way to meet Sandro. The NYU students loafing around the empty fountain in the park were trying out the fall fashions, the boys in sweaters of wholesome colors, orange, brown, and green. The girls in pleated, brushed-cotton coats and suede clogs or those oxfords with the wavy soles. Lace knee socks and hand-tooled leather purses with a long strap worn crosswise between the breasts. A few berets. In light, dry gusts, the air riffled the leaves, yellow as wax beans, and a few floated softly downward. In such hopefulness, even a beret seemed like a good idea.
“[...] He’s calling to those rabbits like they know their names and are going to be happy to see him. I’m thinking, isn’t he amazed by how quickly I got here? Isn’t he going to at least mention it? I was redlining his Jaguar. I pissed in a Dr Pepper bottle. When it was full I pissed in a potato chips bag. I broke the law. Gave up a night’s sleep. Forwent the tube socks at the truck stop.”
“Incredible self-control,” Sandro said.
“All in the name of doing Saul a favor. I mean, you try to help a person. He opens the car door and leans in the back and makes this sound. A wailing. High-pitched.”
“Oh, no,” Sandro said, and put his hands over his face, feigning a brace for disaster.
“Yeah, that’s right. Those goddamn rabbits were dead.”
“You forgot to check on them.”
“My job was transport. And I didn’t hear any complaints from back there. But I had the windows down and there was a lot of truck traffic — especially on the 10. I don’t know what happened. They just… died.”
incredible story
“The great thing is, it’s a buyer’s market right now,” his voice said from the machine. “Then again, if you want to sell, it’s a great time to do so, because it’s a seller’s market right now, too.
“Home. We say ‘home,’ not ‘house.’ You never hear a good agent say ‘house.’ A house is where people have died on the mattresses. Where pipes freeze and burst. Where termites fall from the sink spigot. Where somebody starts a flu fire by burning a telephone book in the furnace. Where banks repossess. Where mental illness takes hold. A home is something else. Do not underestimate the power in the word home. Say it. ‘Home.’ It’s like the difference between ‘rebel’ and ‘thug.’ A rebel is a gleaming individual in tight Levi’s, a sneering and pretty face. The kind Sal Mineo wet-dreams. A thug is hairy and dark, an object that would sink to the bottom when dropped in a lake. A home is maintained. Cared for. Loved. The word home is savory like gravy, and like gravy, kept warm. A good realtor says ‘home.’ Never ‘house.’ Always ‘cellar’ and never ‘basement.’ Basements are where cats crap on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about sexual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine. Cellar means a proximity to the earth that’s not about blackness and rot but the four ritual seasons. We say ‘autumn,’ not ‘fall.’ We say ‘The leaves in this area are simply magnificent in autumn.’ We say ‘simply magnificent,’ and by the way, ‘lawn,’ not ‘yard.’ It’s ‘underarm’ to ‘armpit.’ Would you say ‘armpit’ to a potential buyer? Say ‘yard’ and your buyer pictures rusted push mowers, plantar warts. Someone shearing off his thumb and a couple of fingers with a table saw. A tool shed where water-damaged pornography and used motor oil funneled into fabric softener bottles cohabitate with hints of trauma that are as thick and dark as the oil. I’m not talking about Playboy or Oui. Harder stuff. Amateur. Pictorials featuring married people with their flab and bruises and smallpox vaccines, doing things to each other in rec rooms and sheds like the one housing these selfsame magazines. Middle-aged couples who get trashed on tequila and document with a supply of flash cubes. You have to be careful about words. You’re thinking about your commission, your hands are starting to shake at the idea of the money, and meanwhile your client hears ‘yard’ and sees himself nudging icky amateur porno with his foot, potato bugs scattering from their damp hideout underneath. Again, it’s ‘lawn.’ ‘Lawn’ means crew-cut grass. It means censorship, nice and wholesome. It means America. And you know what I mean by America, and by the way, ‘cul-de-sac.’ Not ‘dead end.’ If I have to explain that, you’ll never pass the exam to get your license. We say ‘dinner.’ Never ‘supper.’ ‘Dinner’ is the middle class, semi-religious… Christian… Christianesque. ‘Dinner’ is a touch-tone doorbell with a little orange light glowing from within the rectangular button. The bell is there for expected guests. People carrying warm dishes covered with gingham checked cloth — the cloth, needless to say, has been laundered with stain remover. The type of people with stained old dishrags are not going to press this doorbell. No one with a beard. No one with a grievance. Only people who share the values of the hosts. ‘Thank you for having us to dinner in your lovely home.’ Say ‘dinner.’ Say ‘home.’ Say ‘lawn.’ Don’t be afraid. Like prayer, through repetition and habit, these words will begin to—”
Stanley shut off the reel-to-reel machine.
i kinda love this (tho the format is a little gimmicky)
I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie’s studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.
Sandro was telling Burdmoore, who was up front, about my motorcycle crash on the salt flats, and how I’d ended up driving the land speed vehicle that his family sponsored, and I sensed he was framing the story as far-fetched, outlandish, but I could have been projecting, since there was a divide between us on the subject. Burdmoore turned around and looked at me with a certain amusement, not unsexual, but not lustful, either. The facts of the story made him a little curious, that was all. A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them. This should have been amusing to me, the expression on Burdmoore’s face as Sandro recounted the story. But I was focused on Ronnie and Talia, on the way he was making her laugh. Taxi-dino, innuendo. Pointing out a green-and-yellow Blimpie’s sign, “There! One of ours!” Her laughter penetrating his fake sincerity like carbonation.
It was late and dark and smoky at Rudy’s. The booth had broken into several conversations, Ronnie next to Saul Oppler, who had fully forgiven him for killing his rabbits. Ronnie was looking at Saul’s hands. “Saul,” he said, “you have no fingerprints.” Saul looked at his own hands, old and giant and strong, hands that looked like they could pulverize rocks. He examined his smooth fingerpads and shrugged. He said he used his hands. To make paintings. Just worked the prints right off, he said.
Ronnie said he never knew it could be that easy.
“What do you mean, easy?” Saul said. “I’ve been in the studio for forty-eight years. You call that easy?”
“I meant getting rid of your—”
“I didn’t get my first solo show until I was thirty-seven years old! Easy. To hell with it,” Saul said.
this is hilarious cus it's soon after Ronnie has told a story about his brother burning off his fingerprints at the age of 18
(dialogue inspo: no adjectives, the emotion clearly visible through the speech itself)